A Blurry Portrait

Memphis debuts on Broadway.

Memphis debuts on Broadway.
On October 19th, Beale
Street intersected with Broadway in a manner that would permanently
short-circuit MapQuest and should make local tourism concerns happy.
That's when Memphis, the musical, opened on New York's Great
White Way.

A bold attempt to encompass the spirit of our fair city,
Memphis begins in the 1950s with the entrance of young, white
music enthusiast Huey Calhoun (Chad Kimball) into the blues nightclub
owned by Delray (J. Bernard Calloway) and featuring star performances
by Delray's sister Felicia Farrell (Montego Glover). Huey is met with
immediate suspicion; he is white, after all, in a black club. But once
he proves his love of the underground music — as well as some
affection for the attractive Felicia — he is gradually accepted
among the patrons.

Illiterate, unable to hold down a job, and basically directionless,
Huey's life takes off once he experiences true Memphis blues. He hops
from a job selling records at a department store to a gig as a DJ at a
local radio station once his bosses catch on that "race records" sell
like hotcakes. The world changes, as if overnight, when Huey starts
spinning the music of Delray's club on the Memphis airwaves — as
punctuated by jazzed-up, white-bread bobbysoxers and lettermen letting
loose on the song "Everybody Wants To Be Black on a Saturday Night" and
an impressive, desegregated double-dutch jump-rope display.

Meanwhile, Huey and Felicia inch toward coupledom. Huey's racist
mother breaks the only copy of Felicia's single, but Huey assembles
Delray's club musicians to accompany her live on the air. She's an
immediate sensation and her newfound success seems to seal the deal
that Huey might be the man for her. Before long, she's on the fast
track to a record deal in New York and Huey goes from radio DJ to TV
dance-show host. Egos collide, racism divides, and eventually Huey must
decide which is more important to him — Felicia or her music
— and whether he can ever leave his hometown, even if it means
superstardom in New York.

Like Memphis or loathe it (I'm talking city now, not musical), there
is an unmistakable flavor to it. Thus, any musical distillation of our
hometown would be hard-pressed to get all of the ingredients just
right. Bookwriter/lyricist Joe DiPietro (who wrote the delightful stage
confection I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change) and
music/lyrics writer and Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan have painted
Memphis using broad strokes — a blurry portrait that evokes but
does not specify contributions made by actual figures in actual places.
Dick Clark gets more mention in Memphis than Martin Luther King.
We hear of the Orpheum and Overton Park but get little sense of the
rest of Huey and Felicia's world. The "when" and "where" of
Memphis look and feel like places the authors have heard a lot
about but never visited; the characters familiar but unmet.

And yet, as fantasy, Memphis works just fine. Kimball and
Glover are canny performers with the right balance of optimism and
Mid-Southern weariness. In fact, if there is a specifically Memphis
detail in the production, it is Kimball's Huey. He's odd, squirmy, and
funky but bewilderingly endearing in a manner still findable in
Memphis. Thrift-store clothes, a bit of a stink on him, an infectious
smile ... you've seen a dozen of them. This doesn't compensate for the
predictable romance or lack of real chemistry in what should be an
ultra-charged, forbidden interracial affair, but it helps.

Glover and Kimball are offered show-stoppers in "Colored Woman" and
"Memphis Lives in Me." The tunes themselves aren't memorable (this
music is for tapping your foot to, not humming along with), but they're
performed with such verve that you won't mind not recalling them
later.

Ultimately, Memphis succeeds as Broadway musical but not as
Beale. In New York, it looked great. (The audience rewarded the
hardworking performers with a much-deserved standing O.) But Memphians
might not recognize much. There's a street authenticity to what you
find in the better Beale Street clubs or, say, Wild Bill's on Vollintine that can't exist in the scrubbed-down Shubert Theatre in
Manhattan. Memphis is all glitz and gloss, with razzle-dazzle
smiles. It flatters but along the way loses the very real struggles
that can't be solved with production numbers.